Oh Mom, I'm Sick Of 'Fur Elise'; To the Rescue of Intermediate Pianists

Children taking piano lessons today can choose from an extensive repertory of elementary-level pieces by the greatest of composers. Bach and Schumann wrote volumes of such works, though they had personal as well as pedagogical reasons to do so: both were doting fathers. Lots of little minuets and dance pieces by Mozart are ideal for children, which only makes sense: he composed them when he was a child himself. Beethoven wrote quite a few works for beginning-level pianists, though he may have been motivated more by a chance to make extra money than by genuine affection for children. Still, the Minuet in G and ''Fur Elise'' have been played by grateful youngsters ever since.

The practice of providing pieces for students to play continued in the 20th century with composers like Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Kabalevsky, Ross Lee Finney and Gyorgy Kurtag. Bela Bartok alone composed a whole catalog of teaching pieces including six volumes of ''Mikrokosmos,'' which begin with simple five-finger exercises and progress to works of considerable difficulty.

But few works by 20th-century composers are pegged to students at an intermediate level. That void worried the composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, who is very involved in music education. In 1997 while composer in residence at Carnegie Hall, Ms. Zwilich decided to do something about it.

She approached Judith Arron, who was then the executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall, and together they commissioned 10 international composers to write piano works of an intermediate level. Those who accepted ranged from the imposing Serialist Milton Babbitt to the composer known as Hannibal, whose music is steeped in spirituals learned while working in the cotton fields of Texas and drum rhythms assimilated while living in Africa.

The pieces have just been published by Boosey & Hawkes as the ''Carnegie Hall Millennium Piano Book.'' The volume includes a CD of all the works, performed by the pianist Ursula Oppens, a champion of contemporary music. And tonight Ms. Oppens will participate with four young conservatory student pianists in a concert at Weill Recital Hall in which all 10 pieces will receive their world premieres.

The dearth of contemporary intermediate-level works has several possible explanations. In earlier times amateur music-making flourished even in middle-class households: if you wanted music in your daily life you had to make it yourself. That once-vibrant tradition has never recovered from the invention of the radio and the phonograph. Another factor may be the increasing complexity and specialization of 20th-century music, which has tended to put off audiences and isolate composers.

The void has made it harder for new music to reach people. In the 19th century amateurs at home and students in conservatories could immerse themselves in the music of their own time. Today, after children practice their elementary pieces by Bach and Bartok, they can generally turn only to earlier centuries for intermediate-level works.

Ms. Zwilich, who inaugurated several educational projects during her tenure at Carnegie Hall, thought that addressing this ''vacuum in the piano repertory'' was important.

''We have lost some noble traditions in our time,'' she said in a recent telephone interview from her home in Florida. ''As composers we ought to be able to speak to all different people, including students and amateurs.'' Ms. Arron (who would die of breast cancer in 1998) agreed completely and secured financial backing from the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, with additional support from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust.

Ms. Arron and Ms. Zwilich recruited the composers, looking especially at those who had ''never done this kind of thing before,'' Ms. Zwilich said. Besides Mr. Babbitt, the roster includes brainy contemporary masters like Elliott Carter whose works are known for their difficulty.

The other composers in this wildly varied ''Millennium Piano Book'' are Wolfgang Rihm, the formidable German; Frederic Rzewski, an American best known for his pummeling, virtuosic 50-minute piano piece, ''The People United Will Never Be Defeated!''; John Harbison, whose much-debated opera, ''The Great Gatsby,'' was recently given its Metropolitan Opera premiere; two Chinese-born composers, Tan Dun and Chen Yi; and Ms. Zwilich.

While seeking diversity in composers, Ms. Zwilich adamantly avoided stipulating just what constitutes an intermediate-level piano piece. The resulting works range from the fairly playable, meaning not overly taxing for the fingers and concentration, to the considerably difficult.

Reflecting on the Millennium Book pieces recently in her Upper West Side studio, Ms. Oppens conceded that some of them were quite hard, Mr. Babbitt's in particular. ''It's a fancy, elegant and spiffy piece, but it's difficult,'' she said. She pointed to four others that would reasonably be considered of intermediate level by any student pianist. Mr. Rihm's ''Zwiesprache'' is a set of five meditative, languidly lyrical memorial pieces. Louis Andriessen's ''Image de Moreau'' is a Minimalistic swirl of chords and colors. Mr. Harbison's ''On an Unwritten Letter'' alternates subdued chorale passages with animated contrapuntal writing in two parts. And there is Ms. Zwilich's ''Lament,'' written in memory of Ms. Arron.

''I was working on my Fourth Symphony, when the call came from Carnegie Hall abut Judy's death,'' Ms. Zwilich said. ''I sat at my desk and this thing poured out of me.''

Though not challenging technically, she added, the piece is challenging musically. The pianist must work hard to highlight and project a slow-moving lyrical line that runs through the work. The piece also calls for extensive use of rubato, that is, rhythmic freedom; but the use of rubato has ''a structural meaning and is not just an expressive indulgence,'' she said.

Then there are works like Ms. Chen's ''Ba Ban,'' filled with swirling figurations, and Mr. Rzewski's propulsive ''The Days Fly By,'' which make big effects through modest technical means. There is a long tradition of such works. Quite a few Liszt pieces lie fairly easily in the fingers but are calculated to impress. Summing up the overall level of difficulty in the works, Ms. Oppens said, ''the average is intermediate.''

So, if most of the pieces in this collection are not going to be played by children in the middle grades, they might be taken up by college and conservatory students who have steered clear of contemporary music because of the difficulty involved.

In tonight's concert, Ms. Oppens will perform the works by Mr. Harbison and Tan Dun. Four students who were selected through a sort of uncompetitive competition will play the other eight.

''Carnegie Hall felt that a real competition would be inappropriate and undoable,'' Ms. Oppens said. ''So, I paired the pieces in groups of two and sent them to four conservatories and asked each, by whatever means they wanted, to have two students learn the pieces and submit tapes.''

The tapes were listened to blindly. Those selected were: Ofra Yitzhaki, an Israeli pianist pursuing a master's degree at Juilliard; a Wisconsin native, Kuang-Hao Huang, who is doing doctoral work at Northwestern University; Kozue Jinnouchi, the bachelor of music program at the Eastman School of Music, and Kirill Gerstein, who moved to New York six years ago from Russia and is now a student at the Manhattan School of Music.

Mr. Gerstein recently spent an afternoon at Ms. Oppens's studio being coached in the Rihm and Carter works he will play tonight. The title of Mr. Carter's ''Two Diversions'' suggests that the music is supposed to be diverting. The notes and rhythms are undeniably tough to master. The music could be called intermediate-level in that each piece presents a straightforward musical challenge. The first involves just two elements: a slow lyrical line that threads through the piece and a contrasting fanciful line that continually darts about. In the second piece two rather independent voices get respectively faster and slower at the same time.

''To be honest,'' Mr. Gerstein said before playing the pieces for Ms. Oppens, ''I did find the Carter to be not an easy thing to learn. It was a good healthy challenge. I learned a lot in the process.''

As he sat down at Ms. Oppens's piano that day, he placed on the music stand a huge rectangle of cardboard on which the pages of the score, in photocopied reductions, had been pasted so that he would not have to deal with page turns. He called it his ''road map.''

As he plays, it is clear to Ms. Oppens that the young pianist, tackling his first Carter work, has studied its notes, rhythms and structure quite carefully. He finds great color in the music. She feels, though, that he is not making sufficient contrasts between the two elements in the first Diversion.

''One line should be slow and steady,'' she explains. ''The other should be as varied, operatic and imaginative as possible.'' Mr. Gerstein's overall tempo is a bit fast, she thinks. ''What you are doing is real good,'' she adds, ''but it's worth making sure that the tempi are perfect. The idea is to be exceedingly expressive without doing things to the tempo itself.''

To help him relax with the music, Ms. Oppens, a formidable technician, offers some self-effacing encouragement. ''I can't really hear counterpoint anyway,'' she said, ''so I just take turns hearing each voice, and it works for the listener.''

In another place, where she feels that Mr. Gerstein is a bit constrained, she says, ''That's where I really try to let the hands be separated and just hope that they will wind up in the same place.'' Mr. Gerstein tries the passage again, and the difference is striking. His playing is fanciful and the skittish lines finally evoke the diverting quality of the title.

To Mr. Carter, ''Two Diversions'' is an intermediate-level piano piece. Expanding on why he had not written such works before, he explained that composers in the highly experimental 20th century had to labor hard to come up with a distinctive style. ''It's difficult to write something simplified that represents your style,'' he said. ''We try to find our own voice and sing; sometimes we don't sing simply.''

Mr. Gerstein found the effort of learning Mr. Carter's piece well worth it. ''At first it was rather confusing,'' he said, ''but I find that the more I play it and live with it, the more clarity it has for me. Now it seems just a clean combination of different lines. It seems to be simple, in a good sense.''

That Mr. Gerstein has come to that realization and is game to try other, harder, contemporary works, seems an endorsement for the Millennium Piano Book project. Ms. Zwilich has only one more hope: ''I'd be happy if every composer in the world would get this book, say, 'Gee, I could do better than that,' and sit down and try the same thing.''